A Tanzanian Experience
by Several years ago I went to Tanzania as part of a charity providing aid to local communities. I wrote this for all the people who helped me raise the money to allow me to go.
Several years ago I went to Tanzania as part of a charity supplying aid to local communities. This is what I reported to the many people who helped me raise the money to allow me to go.
‘I don’t know what the weather was like in Fife at the end of May but in Tanzania it rained great sheets of solid water for almost the whole of my visit. So while you may have been enjoying a little early summer sunshine I found myself slipping and slithering through a sea of mud. Given the dress code of long skirts (never trousers for women) and with a graceful pair of hiking boots it must have been a pretty sight, thank goodness the photos didn’t turn out too well!
The area known as Arusha sits high in the mountains about 2 hours north of the famous Kilimanjaro Mountain, which I never did see because of the cloud cover. It is an agricultural area with a scattered population of around 15000 all eking out a meagre living on tiny plots of land – growing coffee, bananas, maize and sizel that in a good harvest year is sold for rope making. Sitting right in the mountains and with so much rain it is incredibly lush, getting noticeably drier and with less well-developed crops the lower you travel.
The people are wonderfully welcoming, taking you into their hearts, homes and churches with great joy. One rather mixed blessing was attending one of their 3-hour church services completely in Swahili – though I would not have missed the sheer joy of the congregation’s unaccompanied and untrained harmony voices raised in song.
Together with another 6 volunteers (all teachers) the accommodation was surprisingly comfortable. Each bedroom slept 4 in bunk beds with a shared bathroom with occasional flushing toilet and a sort of hose-down shower that was sometime even hot. However, with so few of us there during the rainy season I was fortunate enough to have a room to myself and was soon very snug in a cocoon of mosquito netting. With our health a major consideration for the charity throughout our stay the food was wonderful, if I’m honest a lot healthier than anything I produce in my modern kitchen. Japhet, poached from one of the safari lodges in the north of Tanzania, produced a huge variety of dishes in a tiny open roofed kitchen with a 4 burner calor gas stove and an oven whose door had fallen off and was replaced with kitchen foil.
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